Night-to-Earth approach of potentially hazardous asteroid

Loren Roberson

It comes right from the desk of the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the Earth and the space rock "Asteroid 2010 WC9" will be at the closest distance ever recorded in the past three hundred years.

"The rock completed its orbit and is now hurtling back towards Earth eight years later", JPL explained in a statement. This isn't a particularly large Asteroid, it measures 197 to 427-feet.

"There are lots of asteroids and comets in our solar system and it's impossible to predict the trajectories of all of these objects, but we need to try", University of Saskatchewan astronomy professor Daryl Janzen said in a statement online. "We knew enough not to be anxious", said Dr. Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, after the object was discovered in 2010. Nearly eight years later, employees of the Observatory again managed to capture the asteroid. Just recently, asteroid 2018 GE3 zipped by our planet and barely missed hitting it, and it was discovered only after it had already passed.

The asteroid is set to fly by at 6:05 p.m. ET, and will be within 126,419 miles of Earth, roughly half the distance from the Earth to the moon, Weather.com reports.

At its closest, the asteroid will come close to Earth within 0.53 lunar distances - around 203,000km.

The "missing" asteroid 2010 WC9 approaching Earth. Our display will be updated every five seconds. If you do not have a telescope and still enthused about watching the rock fall by, then there is a live streaming from Northholt Branch Observatories in London. However, astronomers weren't able to gather enough data to nail down the asteroid's orbit at the time, and 2010 WC9 went off the radar for more than seven years.

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